Differences from server logs [LWN.net]

Differences from server logs

Posted Mar 31, 2005 4:07 UTC (Thu) by yodermk (subscriber, #3803)
In reply to: Differences from server logs by corbet
Parent article: Unexpected features in Acrobat 7

But they would track it if a web page link were emailed to a friend and he clicked it.

Sure, this behavior might be unexpected, but I don't see any reason to panic. There are much more interesting things to worry about. Plus, is it really wrong for a content author to know a bit about how far their content has spread? In nearly all cases, an IP address doesn't tell much about you.

Then, maybe I just don't understand some of the privacy advocates. The fact of our economy is such that unless you decide to be a hermit, some aggregate information is going to be collected about you. In reality, why does that matter? I don't feel like I have any reason to care that my credit card company knows I've recently ordered from Newegg and Reasons to Believe, and flown LanPeru. Are they going to hunt me down to do Bad Things to me? Worst case scenario, I might get more ads of some sort as a result, but they just might be targetted and are easy to ignore.

Now, when someone installs a videocamera in my house, there's reason to be concerned....

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Sometimes you really don't want the author to know...

Posted Mar 31, 2005 8:50 UTC (Thu) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link]

Plus, is it really wrong for a content author to know a bit about how far their content has spread? In nearly all cases, an IP address doesn't tell much about you.

Try this skenario: Whistleblower at a Big Corrupt Corporation mails law enforcement officials an internal PDF document exposing illegal activities by the top management. Unfortunately the PDF was tracked and the Law Enforcer just naively opens it with Acrobat, thus alerting the corrupt management to the investigation, and giving them a head start with the paper shredders...

For a long time I thought of PDFs as just a kind of digital paper. Too bad they have now endowed it with capabilities to perform surprising activities when the document is merely read. We really need an electronic docment format that is guaranteed to be "inert". I guess plain ASCII is left, but something with richer formatting capabilities would also be nice.

Sometimes you really don't want the author to know...

Posted Mar 31, 2005 14:52 UTC (Thu) by cpm (guest, #3554) [Link]

If I want the author to know, I can email, call, write, them and
tell them.

If I don't, or more to the point, don't care, then I don't. It shouldn't
be a mandatory, or opt-out (why is this in contemporary parlance, is
it the spam issues and the spam laws? yes!) issue.

A PDF *should* be an electronic document. Nothing more.

It can be copied, messed with, forged, and all that rot. To add all these
bells and whistles to it, to fend off these old-as-the-written-word
issues with "documents" (What is a document anyway?*) is to create
yet-still-another legal morass of so-called "Intellectual Property"
disputes.

It's a PDF. Once it has been printed, it's as good as the paper it's
printed on. Want to have some assurance that its "real" ? wrap it
in gpg/pgp before you send it.

Oh, yes, many will say that using decent crypto/signature is too much
bother, and they are right. But everything else is often simple
to break/ignore/circumvent etcetera.

Sometimes you really don't want the author to know...

Posted Mar 31, 2005 17:28 UTC (Thu) by juha (subscriber, #5866) [Link]

> A PDF *should* be an electronic document. Nothing more.

Is it possible to create a filter program to remove these extra features from the .pdf file?